a statement from his hospital bed -- we mourn the loss of a true american patriot. more than that he was a good and a decent man and a dear friend. joining me by telephone is retired general barry mccaffery, now a msnbc news analyst. you were widely believed to be his favorite general. so tell us about the man that you knew, and for all of us gen-xers and older who got to know him, tell us about his characterizations. >> a good way to set it up, thomas. i think he was a great man. he was ferociously intelligent, sometimes missed that this guy had a genius-level i.q., a bundle of energy, more importantly to us -- a lot of our senior military leaders are good organizers with great energy, but this guy had a sense of strategic understanding of the battlefield, so what's discounted nowadays is that four-day ground victory for the first war, going into it we were dealing with the fourth largest army in the face of the earth that then was pulled apart by u.s. airpower, naval power, but more importantly by schwarzkopf, instead of banging away directly at the enemy and circling the whole for